Is TV violence all that bad for kids?

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It's how kids live and relate that's important, not what
they watch, writes Hugh Mackay.

"Violent games provoke children" thundered a recent headline,
calculated, no doubt, to send a chill up the spine of any parent.
Quoting an article in the latest issue of the British medical
journal The Lancet, The Weekend Australian reported that "there is
consistent evidence of an association between younger children
watching media violence and showing more aggressive play and
behaviour".

At first glance, this looked like a re-run of the conclusion
drawn from an infamous, but influential, US experiment conducted in
the early 1960s that went roughly like this: One group of children
was shown a film in which children were seen punching an inflatable
Bobo doll. Another group was not shown the film. Each group was
then taken into a room where Bobo dolls were present and - are you
ready for this? - the children who had seen the film were more
likely than the other children to punch the Bobo dolls.

The experiments have become more sophisticated in the
intervening 40 years and, contrary to the impression conveyed by
that headline, the Birmingham University authors of the Lancet
article showed admirable restraint in their conclusion that the
effects of media violence are mainly short-term "copycat" effects
in very young children (boys more than girls), hard to separate
from personality and social factors, and apparently unrelated to
rates of violent crime in the community.

Clearly, there are huge individual differences in all this: some
kids never behave violently, regardless of how much you provoke
them; others will beat each other up while, metaphorically
speaking, you're still inflating your Bobo dolls. But many
researchers operate as if it is their responsibility to demonstrate
that video violence has a direct effect on the behaviour of young
children, because that will help to explain why society is becoming
more violent.

What should we make of the studies of cities whose rates of violent crime fell when TV was introduced?

Whoa! I'm all in favour of parents monitoring the rubbish their
children watch on a video screen, but the evidence for this
presumed link between media violence and a violent world is
actually counter-intuitive: violence in societies such as ours is
declining, as media violence increases. In the US, the rate of
violent crime has been in sustained decline for 10 years.

So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent
video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should
we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?
I have no idea, but it's a more interesting question than the other
one.

The copycat effects of media violence, similar to those
previously attributed to westerns, radio serials and comic books,
are easy to exaggerate.

But what will we make of the well-documented studies of cities
whose rates of violent crime fell when TV was introduced? Or of the
fact that the lightest users of TV (young males in their late teens
and early 20s) tend to be the most violent members of our society?
One possible explanation is that if you are at home watching TV,
you're not out in the street punching someone's head in.

This is not to whitewash media violence, nor to ignore the cries
of parents who observe direct and unpleasant effects in their own
children. Still, most of those effects occur in the context of
harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not
normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video
games, since most children do not become aggressive little
monsters.

Frankly, I'm more worried about the violence we do to ourselves
and our children by allowing the media to create an expectation of
instant gratification. "Boring!" has become the catchcry of an
impatient community so drenched in fast-paced media that we are in
danger of thinking that anything worthy of our attention must be
brief and entertaining.

Even more worrying is the violence we do to our personal
relationships when we let media consume time we might otherwise
spend with each other.

On average, Australians watch more than three hours of
television a day, compared with 12 minutes a day spent by the
average couple talking to each other.

Some researchers sensibly suggest that rather than worrying too
much about which programs our children are watching, we should
concentrate on trying to reduce the total amount of time they spend
in front of the screen. The more time they spend socialising, the
sooner they learn how to get along with other people.

By the time children reach the age of about seven, the question
is not "what is TV doing to them?" but "what are they doing with
TV?" The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you
want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the
social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and
the values they bring to the viewing experience. The effects of
media violence look pale beside these.